instances errs rather on the side of excess than defect. Among those who, from the hovels in which they live, and the herbs and roots which constitute their diet, are mistaken by travellers for proofs and specimens of general indigence, there are numbers who have hoards in leathern bags, consisting of sums in five-franc pieces, which they keep by them perhaps for a whole generation, unless brought out to be expended in their most cherished gratification -the purchase of land. If there is a moral inconvenience attached to a state of society in which the peasantry have land, it is the danger of their being too careful of their pecuniary concerns; of its making them crafty, and "calculating" in the objectionable sense. The French peasant is no simple countryman, no downright "peasant of the Danube:"* both in fact and in fiction he is now "the crafty peasant." That is the stage which he has reached in the progressive development which the constitution of things has imposed on human intelligence and human emancipation. But some excess in this direction is a small and a passing evil compared with recklessness and improvidence in the labouring classes, and a cheap price to pay for the inestimable worth of the virtue of self-dependence, as the general characteristic of a people: a virtue which is one of the first conditions of excellence in a human character-the stock on which if the other virtues are not grafted, they have seldom any firm root; a quality indispensable in the case of a labouring class, even to any tolerable degree of physical comfort; and by which the peasantry of France, and of most European countries of peasant proprietors, are distinguished beyond any other labouring population.

§ 4. Is it likely, that a state of economical relations so conducive to frugality and prudence in every other respect, should be prejudicial to it in the cardinal point of increase of population? That it is so, is the opinion expressed by most of those English political economists who have written anything about the matter. Mr. *See the celebrated fable of La Fontaine.

M'Culloch's opinion is well known. Mr. Jones affirms, that a "peasant population, raising their own wages from the soil, and consuming them in kind, are universally acted upon very feebly by internal checks, or by motives disposing them to restraint. The consequence is, that unless some external cause, quite independent of their will, forces such peasant cultivators to slacken their rate of increase, they will, in a limited territory, very rapidly approach a state of want and penury, and will be stopped at last only by the physical impossibility of procuring subsistence." He elsewheret speaks of such a peasantry as "exactly in the condition in which the animal disposition to increase their numbers is checked by the fewest of those balancing motives and desires which regulate the increase of superior ranks or more civilized people." The

แ

causes of this peculiarity" Mr. Jones promised to point out in a subsequent work, which never made its appearance. I am totally unable to conjecture from what theory of human nature, and of the motives which influence human conduct, he would have derived them. Arthur Young assumes the same "peculiarity" as a fact; but, though not much in the habit of qualifying his opinions, he does not push his doctrine to so violent an extreme as Mr. Jones; having, as we have seen, himself testified to various instances in which peasant populations, such as Mr. Jones speaks of, were not tending to "a state of want and penury," and were in no danger whatever of coming in contact with "physical impossibility of procuring subsistence.

That there should be discrepancy of experience on this matter, is easily to

be accounted for. Whether the labouring people live by land or by wages they have always hitherto multiplied up to the limit. set by their habitual standard of comfort. When that standard was low, not exceeding a scanty subsistence, the size of properties, as well as the rate of wages,

that in the Swiss Cantons, the patrimonies of the peasants are ever so divided as to reduce them below an honourable competence; though the habit of foreign service, by opening to the children a career indefinite and uncalculable, sometimes calls forth a superabundant population."*

There is similar testimony respect ing Norway. Though there is no law or custom of primogeniture, and no manufactures to take off a surplus population, the subdivision of property is not carried to an injurious extent. "The division of the land among children," says Mr. Laing,† "appears not, during the thousand years it has been in operation, to have had the effect of reducing the landed properties to the minimum size that will barely support human existence. I have counted from five-and-twenty to forty cows upon farms, and that in a country in which the farmer must, for at least seven months in the year, have winter provender and houses provided for all the cattle. It is evident that some cause or other, operating on aggregation of landed property, counteracts the dividing effects of partition among children. That cause can be no other than what I have long conjectured would be effective in such a social arrangement; viz. that in a country where land is held, not in tenancy merely, as in Ireland, but in full ownership, its aggregation by the deaths of co-heirs, and by the marriages of the female heirs among the body of landholders, will balance its subdivision by the equal succession of children. The whole mass of property will, I conceive, be found in such a state of society to consist of as many estates of the class of 10007., as many of 100l., as many of 10l., a year, at one period as at another." That this should happen, supposes diffused through society a very efficacious prudential check to population: and it is reasonable to give part of the credit of this prudential restraint to the peculiar adaptation of the peasant-proprietary system for fostering it.

*Nouveaux Principes, Book iii. ch. 3.
↑ Residence in Norway, p. 18.

"In some parts of Switzerland," says Mr. Kay,* "as in the canton of Argovie for instance, a peasant never marries before he attains the age of twenty-five years, and generally much later in life; and in that canton the women very seldom marry before they have attained the age of thirty. . . Nor do the division of land and the cheapness of the mode of conveying it from one man to another, encourage the providence of the labourers of the rural districts only. They act in the same manner, though perhaps in a less degree, upon the labourers of the smaller towns. In the smaller provincial towns it is customary for a labourer to own a small plot of ground outside the town. This plot he cultivates in the evening as his kitchen garden. He raises in it vegetables and fruits for the use of his family during the winter. After his day's work is over, he and his family repair to the garden for a short time, which they spend in planting, sowing, weeding, or preparing for sowing, a harvest, according to the season. The desire to become possessed of one of these gardens operates very strongly in strengthening prudential habits and in restraining improvident marriages. Some of the manufacturers in the canton of Argovie told me that a townsman was seldom contented until he had bought a garden, or a garden and house, and that the town labourers generally deferred their marriages for some years, in order to save enough to purchase either one or both of these luxuries."

The same writer shows by statistical evidence † that in Prussia the average age of marriage is not only much later than in England, but "is gradually becoming later than it was formerly," while at the same time "fewer illegiti mate children are born in Prussia than in any other of the European countries." "Wherever I travelled," says Mr. Kay, "in North Germany and Switzerland, I was assured by all that the desire to obtain land, which was felt by all the peasants, was acting as *Vol. i. pp. 67-9. Ibid. p. 90.

+ Ibid. pp. 75-9.

the strongest possible check upon undue increase of population."*

Mr.

In Flanders, according to Fauche, the British Consul at Ostend,† "farmer's sons and those who have the means to become farmers will delay their marriage until they get possession of a farm." Once a farmer, the next object is to become a proprietor. "The first thing a Dane does with his savings," says Mr. Browne, the Consul at Copenhagen, "is to purchase a clock, then a horse and cow, which he hires out, and which pays a good interest. Then his ambition is to become a petty proprietor, and this class of persons is better off than any in Denmark. Indeed, I know of no people in any country who have more easily within their reach all that is really necessary for life than this class, which is very large in comparison with that of labourers."

But the experience which most decidedly contradicts the asserted tendency of peasant proprietorship to produce excess of population, is the case of France. In that country the experiment is not tried in the most favourable circumstances, a large proportion of the properties being too small. The number of landed proprietors in France is not exactly ascertained, but on no estimate does it fall much short of five millions; which, on the lowest calculation of the number of persons of a family (and for France

The Prussian minister of statistics, in a work (Condition of the People in Prussia) which I am obliged to quote at second hand from Mr. Kay, after proving by figures the great and progressive increase of the consumption of food and clothing per head of the population, from which he justly infers a corresponding increase of the productiveness of agriculture, continues: "The division of estates has, since 1831, proceeded more and more throughout the country. There are now many more small independent proprietors than formerly. Yet, however many complaints of pauperism are heard among the dependent labourers, we never hear it complained that pauperism is increasing among the peasant proprietors."Kay, i. 262-6.

In a communication to the Commissioners of Poor Law Enquiry, p. 640 of their Foreign Communications, Appendix F to their First Report. Ibid. 268.

P. E.

it ought to be a low calculation), shows
much more than half the population
as either possessing, or entitled to in-
herit, landed property. A majority of
the properties are so small as not to
afford a subsistence to the proprietors,
of whom, according to some compu-
tations, as many as three millions are
obliged to eke out their means of sup-
port either by working for hire, or by
taking additional land, generally on
metayer tenure.
When the property
possessed is not sufficient to relieve
the possessor from dependence on
wages, the condition of a proprietor
loses much of its characteristic efficacy
as a check to over-population: and if
the prediction so often made in Eng
land had been realized, and France
had become a "pauper warren," the
experiment would have proved nothing
against the tendencies of the same
system of agricultural economy in
other circumstances. But what is the
fact? That the rate of increase of
the French population is the slowest
in Europe. During the generation
which the Revolution raised from the
extreme of hopeless wretchedness to
sudden abundance, a great increase of
population took place. But a gene-
ration has grown up, which, having
been born in improved circumstances,
has not learnt to be miserable; and
upon them the spirit of thrift operates
most conspicuously, in keeping the
increase of population within the in-
crease of national wealth. In a table,
drawn up by Professor Rau,* of the
* The following is the table (see p. 168 of
the Belgian translation of Mr. Rau's large
work):

United States
Hungary (according to Rohrer)
England

Per cent.

1820-30

2.92

2.40

1811-21 1821-31

1.78

Netherlands Scotland Saxony Baden Bavaria

1814-28

1.08

1817-27 (Mathieu) 0.63

and more recently (Moreau de Jonnès) 0.55 But the number given by Moreau de N